I am sitting around a fire outside my home. Above me, a drone circles my house, stopping every few minutes to hover some 15 meters away. Its camera points directly at me, unsubtly filming me in my own yard.
This is not unusual. I am filmed, photographed, tracked and surveilled wherever I go.
In Hebron, the largest city in the occupied West Bank, where my family has lived for generations, the presence of the Israeli state is everywhere. For the 215,000 or so Palestinians here, there is no such thing as privacy.
We are the unwilling test subjects for advancements in methods of population control. Israel uses technology as a tool for ethnic cleansing, designed to drive us out of Hebron’s city centre and make way for the Israeli settlement expansion taking place in breach of international law. My own family is no longer allowed near the house we own and lived in when I was young; the Israeli army evicted us and shut down the area as an Israeli settlement sprang up there.
Now, as we are confined to an increasingly smaller area, Palestinians’ daily lives are being recorded without our consent and turned into data points for the Israeli military and its private-sector partners in the defence industry.
Even as we live under this high-tech occupation, we are denied basic resources. Hebron requires roughly 150 megawatts of power every day, yet there is practically no independent Palestinian production of electricity. Israel holds the power, literally. The West Bank is reliant on the Israel Electric Corporation, which sells Palestinians only two-thirds of what we need.
In winter, we get just ten hours of daylight and temperatures drop to lows of 0℃. The bitter cold creeps into our poorly insulated homes, forcing us to rely on electric heaters. As demand for electricity increases and our underdeveloped infrastructure struggles to cope, electricity is rationed, and the city experiences repeated power outages. During particularly cold spells, these can occur up to several times a day, plunging whole neighbourhoods into darkness over and over for hours at a time.
With our lights, internet and heaters depowered, we sit by the glow of the fire, waiting. A minute or two later, some lights come back on; not ours, those of the Israeli army base and illegal settlement next to my home. The Israeli military and settlements are connected to a separate back-up power grid that does not provide electricity to us. Bright white military floodlights are cast at my house, watching it, watching us.
These selective outages are about more than simply preventing us from adequately powering our homes – they are used to restrict our movement and our freedom. Of the 89 permanent military checkpoints in the West Bank, at least 28 are within one square kilometre in Hebron City. These checkpoints stand between Palestinian homes and our grocery stores, schools and workplaces. To enter or exit our own neighbourhoods, we have to pass through one or more.
Despite being run by the Israeli military, these checkpoints are not hooked up to the same alternative emergency power grid as the army bases, infrastructure and settlements. When there is a power outage, they simply stop functioning. Turnstiles stop working, and people are trapped on one side, unable to enter or exit.
Soldiers refuse to let us use a different entry point, forcing Palestinians to wait for hours in the cold, in the rain, sometimes with young children, for the power to come back on. We are unable to go home, reach work, schools, or hospitals.
Sometimes the soldiers simply claim that a checkpoint has no electricity, even when the rest of Hebron has power, just to show us that they decide whether or not we pass. Israelis, on the other hand, can move around freely, driving on roads from Hebron to Jerusalem that have been permanently closed to Palestinians over the past 30 years, without passing through a single checkpoint or facing any disruption to life.
Our physical confinement is inseparable from our digital confinement, which has worsened with the rise of surveillance technologies and AI in recent years. When the checkpoints are working, they force Palestinians to move through 10 to 15 cameras. Our movements and biometric information are recorded and systematised without our knowledge or consent, while experimental AI-powered weaponry is pointed at us.
Since 2020, heavily armed soldiers have been instructed to use their phones to scan our faces for Israel’s Blue Wolf system, a Facebook-style database that uses facial recognition and stores details about our private lives, such as our family and friends, where we go, what we write on social media, our marital status, if we are secretly gay, and more.
The checkpoints and control rooms themselves use the Red Wolf system, which was reportedly introduced in 2022 to assign Palestinians a colour-coded risk profile based on our political stances or whether we have previously been detained or questioned by the Israeli military. As a nonviolent human rights defender, I am coded red, the highest level, which indicates to Israeli soldiers that they should make my life harder and treat me as a suspect whenever I want to pass to my home.
Amnesty International reports that if “an individual is not registered on the databases, their face is added, without their consent, and they are automatically denied passage” through the checkpoint – which can block their passage home. In that case, the person will need to ask the Palestinian Authority to try to talk to the Israeli army, which can take days or weeks, and even then they are sometimes not allowed in.
We have not consented to our data collection or to being used in experimental technology development of sophisticated means of AI-powered population control.
Petra Molnar
Israeli ministers and officials have repeatedly argued that these measures are necessary to ensure Israel’s ‘security’. But security is merely being used as a pretext for oppression. Closing checkpoints, controlling electricity and extracting our data en masse are tools in a system designed to make Palestinian life unbearable so that we have no choice but to flee our homes. Around a third of Palestinian homes in Hebron’s Old City are vacant, according to a 2015 study cited by the UN.
Israel controls and monitors our every movement, and the international community must act to defend our rights. Western countries invest in Israel’s experimental surveillance technology, tested on us without consent. The people of the world must pressure their governments to stop funding the occupation and make oppression costly to its perpetrators.
As I sit by the fire, surveilled in my own home, I know we will not surrender and we will not leave – but we cannot do it alone.
This article is part of Migration and Tech Monitor’s series, ‘Nothing About Us, Without Us’. Click here to read and contribute to MTM’s Manifesto for Technology as a Tool to Strengthen Society
